Article de la comunicació presentada a International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies (HCist 2017), celebrat a Barcelona el novembre de 2017.

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent that is supposed to act as a social companion with linguistic and emotional competence in the context of basic and health care. The core of the agent is an ontology-based knowledge model that supports flexible reasoning-driven conversation planning strategies. A dedicated search engine ensures the provision of background information from the web, necessary for conducting a conversation on a specific topic. Multimodal communication analysis and generation modules analyze respectively generate facial expressions, gestures and multilingual speech. The assessment of the prototypical implementation of the agent shows that users accept it as a natural and trustworthy conversation counterpart. For the final release, all involved technologies will be further improved and matured.

The presented work is funded by the European Commission as part of the H2020 Program under the contract number 645012. We would like to thank our colleagues Chiara Baudracco, Jutta Mohr, Eylem Ög, Valérie Sarholz, and Benjamin Schäfer for organizing and carrying out the evaluation trials and for their patience with the numerous inadequacies of KRISTINA.